Australian Medical Association

In November 2008 the Council of Australian Governments' agreed to introduce a nationally-consistent approach to activity-based funding for public hospital services to allow comparisons of efficiency across public hospitals.

Subsequently, the Australian Government asked the Productivity Commission to examine and report on the relative performance of the public and private hospital systems. In June 2009, the Productivity Commission released a paper seeking information and feedback on a range of issues including treatment costs, including out-of-pocket patient expenses and rates of fully-informed financial consent, rates of hospital-acquired infections and other relevant performance indicators.

Below are the two submissions the AMA made to the Productivity Commission on the Performance of public and private hospital systems. The AMA submissions also address the Commission's term of reference on informed financial consent.

Establishment of the Healthcare Identifier Service was agreed to by the Council of Australian Governments in 2006 as part of the national approach towards accelerating work on electronic health records to improve the safety of patients and improve efficiency for healthcare providers.

In July 2009, the Department of Health and Ageing released a discussion paper on legislative proposals to support the establishment and implementation of unique identifiers for healthcare purposes and the privacy of health information.

The AMA submission on the discussion paper is supported by the AMA Position Statement on Unique Healthcare Identifiers in 2008.

AMA Position Statement: Connectivity - August 2007

AMA Position Statement: Safety and Quality of E-Health Systems - 2006

AMA Position Statement: Strategic Framework for Improved Information Management through the use of Information Technology in General Practice: A collaborative AMA/RACGP paper - 1997

AMA Position Statement: On-Line and other Broadband Connected Medical Consultations - 2006

AMA Position Statement: Pharmacy Intranet Scheme - 1997

Medical Taskforce on Informatics - Final Report